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The MATE Desktop Environment is the continuation of GNOME 2. It provides an
intuitive and attractive desktop environment using traditional metaphors for
Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

MATE is under active development to add support for new technologies while
preserving a traditional desktop experience. See the Roadmap or
Stefano's presentation at FOSDEM 2014
to find out more about how MATE has evolved and what is planned for the
future. The MATE Manifesto
outlines some of the principles that guide the project.

The MATE community has documented how to install MATE on many distributions in the
install guidelines.

Applications

MATE is composed of a number of applications. The renaming is necessary to
avoid conflicts with GNOME components.

Caja

Caja is the official file manager for the MATE desktop. It allows for browsing
directories, as well as previewing files and launching applications associated
with them. It is also responsible for handling the icons on the MATE desktop.
It works on local and remote filesystems. Caja is a fork of Nautilus.

Pluma

Pluma is a text editor which supports most standard editor features. It also
extends this basic functionality with other features not usually found in
simple text editors. Pluma is a graphical application which supports editing
multiple text files in one window (known sometimes as tabs or MDI). Pluma fully
supports international text through its use of the Unicode UTF-8 encoding in
edited files. Its core feature set includes syntax highlighting of source code,
auto indentation, and printing support (with print preview). Pluma is a fork of
Gedit.

Eye of MATE

eom or the Eye of MATE is a simple graphics viewer for the MATE desktop which
uses the gdk-pixbuf library. It can deal with large images, and can zoom and
scroll with constant memory usage. Its goals are simplicity and standards
compliance. Eye of MATE is a fork of Eye of GNOME.

Atril

Atril is a simple multi-page document viewer. It can display and print
PostScript (PS), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), DJVU, DVI, XPS and Portable
Document Format (PDF) files. When supported by the document, it also allows
searching for text, copying text to the clipboard, hypertext navigation, and
table-of-contents bookmarks. Atril is a fork of Evince.

Engrampa

Engrampa is an archive manager for the MATE environment. It allows you to
create and modify archives, view the contents of an archive, view a file
contained in an archive, and extract files from archive. Engrampa is a fork of
File Roller.

MATE Terminal

MATE Terminal is a terminal emulation application that you can use to access a
UNIX shell in the MATE environment. With it, you can run any application that
is designed to run on VT102, VT220, and xterm terminals. MATE Terminal also has
the ability to use multiple terminals in a single window (tabs) and supports
management of different configurations (profiles). MATE Terminal is a fork of
GNOME Terminal.

Where does the name come from?

The name "MATE", pronounced Ma-Tay, comes from yerba maté, a species of holly native to
subtropical South America. Its leaves contain caffeine and are used to make
infusions and a beverage called mate.